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Remembering Jenna Morrison, a big soul with big soles — Porter

The memorial footpath for yoga teacher Jenna K. Morrison will cost around $125,000 to build and maintain — “She will still massage people’s feet.”

Florian Schuck (right) sits on a bench with Star columnist Catherine Porter in Dufferin Grove Park. Schuck hopes to erect a reflexology footpath here in memory of his wife, Jenna Morrison, who was killed by a truck while riding her bike to pick up their 5-year-old son from school a year and a half ago. (Catherine Porter / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Jenna Morrison had big feet. Her husband told me this while we sat barefoot together on a bench in Dufferin Grove Park.

“Were they beautiful?” I asked.

“No,” Florian Schuck responded, with a laugh. “They were wide. But she was grounded because of that.”

Big soles for a big soul.

Morrison was killed 1.5 years ago while cycling to pick up their 5-year-old son Lucas from school. A giant freightliner truck crushed her beneath its uncaring wheels.

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Her husband, Florian, was broken that day, too. The photo of him being held up by friends near the sight of her death is the picture of despair.

She was five months pregnant with their second child — a miracle, given he had been pronounced sterile after some aggressive treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma a few years earlier.

He credits her love and compassion for his survival.

“She was always missing flights because he had to help pregnant women with their bags. She’d bring homeless kids home at Christmas and explain to her mom, ‘Why not?’ She played with our kid like it was the last day of their lives. She was so into it,” he tells me. “At her funeral, I had people turn to their neighbour and hug and pinch them in the bum because that’s what Jenna would do with total strangers. She had no inhibitions.”

Big soul, big soles.

Shuck lives a short walk from the site of Morrison’s death, a few blocks west at Dundas and Sterling Rd. He passes that wretched spot every day. Every other day, he sees a truck just like the one that killed her — still without the side guard that would have prevented her from rolling under its wheels.

Schuck came up with a different idea, which is why we have discarded our shoes in the park. A reflexology footpath. It’s a concrete path embedded with stones of different shapes and sizes that knead and tickle your feet as you walk barefoot along it.

Morrison was a yoga teacher and Thai massage therapist. She returned from a trip to South Korea 11 years ago raving about them. She wanted to build one in Toronto, “but life got busy, she got pregnant, we had a kid, she had a business as a yoga teacher,” Schuck says.

It is time to build it now.

“She will still massage people’s feet,” he says.

I think about Morrison every day I swing my leg over my bicycle and set off onto the city streets for work, meetings, dates with friends. I think of Schuck’s grief in those photo, too. Together, they are the vision of our vulnerability as cyclists and our need, as a city, for more separated bicycle paths. (Morrison will get one of those too along Sterling Road, Root-McCaig tells me.)

She will now take on a new symbolism and lesson for me — of kindness and spontaneity and walking barefoot in the park on cool June mornings, which I really should do more of. It is delightful.

I have big feet, too. I’d like a soul to match.

When it is finished, the path will be the first of its kind in Canada. Schuck, a production designer in film, has designed the path in the shape of a number eight — the sign for infinity.

“The only tattoo Jenna had on her body was on her ankle,” he says. “It was that symbol, an infinity loop.”

The sky dusts us with rain, then presents us a full, peach sun, as if to underscore Schuck’s message. The park around us is transformed from forest green to emerald green.

We rise from the bench and part ways. I slip my shoes back on. But Schuck walks to his car barefoot.

“I’m going to spend the rest of the day shoeless,” he says.

And he does.

The Jenna K. Morrison memorial footpath will cost around $125,000 to build and maintain. To contribute, go to:

Catherine Porter’s column usually appears on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. She can be reached at cporter@thestar.ca

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